1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a medicine container system using electrical circuits having a timing device which can be set for predetermined elapsed times and provides continuous signals for informing a patient when it is time to take and not to take medication in a simple error free way without the patient having to read clock faces, or digital read outs or remember times or time settings or set timers and for storing information sheets about the medicine and its side effects with the container or in compartments proximate to the normal medicine container and for holding said medicine container or containers in an arranged cluster to consolidate all the medications a person is taking into a single confined arrangement with access to the medications by normal medicine cap removal from each medicine container.
2. Background of the Invention
Medication noncompliance is a major problem in healthcare. According to a report from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) one in two patients neglect and do not take their medication as prescribed, and six out of ten forget, at one point or another, they have already taken a medication and swallow an extra dose sending them to an emergency room for treatment or clearly worsening their current condition.
As a result, accidental prescription drug overdoses have turned into a crisis that is steadily worsening and has become the second leading cause of unintentional injury and death in the United States. Therefore, there exists an undeniable urgency to prevent these overdose injuries and fatalities caused primarily by accidental drug overdose and the misuse of hazardous prescription drugs, in part, because patients do not have sufficient knowledge about the drugs and their side effects with their drug containers and cannot remember when to take their medications or because they forget they have already taken a medication and unknowingly swallow an additional dosage of that medication. Further compounding the unintentional overdose confusion is that patients have many medications to take and they are not all kept in one place in an arranged orderly fashion or do not have mechanisms for indicating the time or time intervals for when to take them or when they were last taken.
Many devices, systems, and methods have been created to aid in the correct timing for the administration of medications to patients. However the prior dosage or dosage timing and measuring devices have generally proved inconvenient, complex and are difficult to use especially by patients with multiple drugs to be taken at different time intervals. Therefore the patients tended to ignore or forget to keep their medication drug schedules and medication regime requirements. Generally, in medication dispensing devices which require activation of a timer and with a patient who takes more medications several times per day, the patient may neglect or forget to activate the timer after taking each medication. Further many times the timing devices, which a patient uses for timing medication doses, are separate from or not associated with the medicine container which held the medication, which generally increased the likelihood of the patient accidentally neglecting to accurately reset time intervals between the daily medication dosages they are supposed to take.
Further medical timing devices with clock faces and/or digital readout incorporated into the cap of medication containers were so small that they were difficult to read and did not help or guide a patient in remembering what the medication interval was from the prescription and further they did not have reader-friendly written information regarding their prescription medications with their medicine containers for easily educating themselves about the time intervals for their medications and the medications' possible side effects.
Various attempts have been made in the past to try to increase and improve compliance by patients. Most of these systems are essentially reminder systems which married alarm clocks to the medication containers to remind patients when it is time to take their medications, but these systems required the patient to remember to reset the alarm for a new time interval and then take there medications and often times patients would forget to reset the timer at the time of taking their medication which led to taking the medication at improper intervals and caused under doses and or over doses.
Also attempts have been made to increase and improve compliance by patients, by providing drug information sheets which accompany the medication container so drug information sheets can be readily available when needed or when questions arise concerning the dosage and any side effects which may be a byproduct of the drugs being taken or any interference side effects caused by drug interactions of the medications the patient is taking. Currently only elemental prescription information such as patient's name, doctor, medicine name and the number of refills etc. is affixed to the medicine bottles. Other critical pharmaceutical drug information is omitted from the bottle and instead is printed by pharmacists and placed in a paper bag, which is stapled to the external side of the package when the drugs are purchased. Patients typically take out the prescription bottle with the medication then stack or store the drug instructions sheets and throw away the bag. In many instances the medicine instruction sheets are thrown away still stapled to the bag, putting patients at risk without accessible medication instructions that could save their lives. Thus storing and retrieving readable and comprehensible pharmaceutical information sheets and preventing patients from losing them, has long been a challenge for patients, pharmacies, and drug makers in the US and around the world. This problem is caused by the fact that all medicine information cannot be affixed to the surface of a bottle due to lack of surface space and even when Consumer Medication Information (CMI) documents are externally stored in medicine cabinets the physical stack, store, and retrieval of the multiple medication instruction documents become too confusing for patients, since it still separates the medications' sheets from the medicines. As a result, there exists a pressing need to eliminate or diminish the risk of losing these critical drug information sheets due to separation from medicine containers. More clearly, a need exists to have easy and prompt retrieval of CMI, without having to identify which CMI leaflets go with which medication and which bottle without having to significantly alter patients' behaviors or the current pharmacy's CMI systems.
The prior art attempted to solve this problem by providing retractable ribbon coils of CMI information in a container which allowed the patient to pull out the medical instructions to be read and then recoil them back into the container, but this re-coilable ribbon container was expensive and required special equipment for printing the ribbon with the required CMI information for each medication. Further the prior art attempted to create exotic bottles with enhanced surface and compartments for labeling which provided all the CMI information but the print was so small and the compartments so complicated in the use of the attached CMI information that a patient was not likely to be able to use the container containing the CMI information in any meaningful way.
Finally there has not been provided a comprehensive system to combine relatively standardized medication containers with means for advising patients of the time when their medication are due to be taken and not taken and which also provides the Complete CMI and FDA required information in a readable form and also allowed all the medications a person is taking to be removable and clipped together into a single arranged cluster for ease of taking and orderly arranging of the medications to be taken, eliminating confusion by the patient and/or the caregiver of a patient. Thereby increasing the effectiveness of medication compliance while reducing drug unintentional illnesses, and helping prevent fatal overdoses.
3. Objects of the Invention
It is an object of this invention to provide a medicine container system for informing a patient when it is time to take and not to take medication and for storing information sheets about the medicine and holding said medicine container or containers in an arranged cluster for the purpose of providing controlled dosage taking of medications which will decrease patient mortality risk and increase their years of healthy living by strengthening patient's medication safety while facilitating drug information and safety compliance for the patient.
It is also an object of this invention to provide a medicine container which looks like a conventional medicine container and is operationally similar to a regular medicine container, but has an electrical circuit having a timing device which can be set for a predetermined elapsed time and provides a continuous signal during the running of the predetermined time until the predetermined time runs out and then provides a different signal when the predetermined time has lapsed until being reset to zero time upon breaking said electrical circuit and restarting the timing device again on closing the circuit for measuring another predetermined elapsed time.
In this invention it is an object to select a predetermined time, like those used to separate medication intake schedules, such as one time per day, two times per day, three times per day or etc. and set the predetermined time to be used. The medication is put in the bottle and the cap is screwed on for delivery of the medication to a patient. The patient then opens the container or bottle by removing the cap to take their medication which then activates the timing device which starts a continuous signal, such as a colored light being lit, like a red one, which is continuously lit while the predetermined time is being run out. This red light is lit as long as the predetermined time, for example, two times a day has been selected, or a twelve hour predetermined time period per day has been selected. While this red light is lit a patient would be alerted that it is not time to take the medication again, but when the predetermined time period has run the red light is shut off and a signal, such as a different colored light is lit, like a green one, which is continuously lit until the patient takes the cap off to take another medication which switches off the green light and when the patient screws the cap back on the medicine bottle the red light is switched back on and a new predetermined time starts to run with the alerting red light lit all during the elapsing of the predetermined time. Thus a patient always knows not to take a medication when the red light is on and to take a medication immediately if the green light is on.
It is also an object of this invention moreover, to provide a speaker which makes an audible sound when the green light comes on or is configured to make an array of signals when the green light comes on to alert the patient that it is time to take a medication. Thus in this embodiment, not only is there a visual signal given but audible sound is generated to alert the patient that it is time to take his medication. This is very important because it does not rely on the green visual signal alone in order to alert the patient that the predetermined elapsed time has passed and that it is time to take the medication again, but alerts the patient by issuing a sound for the patient to hear from afar.
It is further an object of this invention to have a manual switch in the cap to allow the patient to switch on the system when the medicine bottle or container is brought home from the pharmacy. Thus a patient at the time of taking the first pill can switch on the system, which was off, but after switching on the system and returning cap to the container the system immediately starts to run a new predetermined time with the red light lit until the predetermined time has elapsed and the green light is then lit as a signal of time to take the next medication and/or in conjunction with an audible sound such as a buzzer from the speaker also indicating it is time to take the medication.
Yet another object of this invention is to have an easy switch for setting the elapsed time settings by having a slide switch with the medication's elapsed times on it so that the switch can be adjusted easily from one medication time setting to another either at the pharmacy or by the patient without having to have multiple different caps with prebuilt elapsed time settings for each particular medication.
Also an object of this invention is to use a cap which is substantially like those of the caps commonly used on prescription bottles today yet the cap provides a circuit means to break the circuit on removal and close the circuit on the reattachment to a medicine container. This is achieved by providing a switch in the cap which works in conjunction with the outside surface of the upper part of the medicine container which gradually engages the switch in the cap with an inclined surface that forces the switch back into engagement with the circuit for the circuit to be completed and the first signal of, for example, the red light is lit for starting the predetermined time indicated.
It is yet a further object of this invention to provide a light blocking member positioned between the light used for signals and the medication in the bottle such that the light from the LED is not transmitted through to the medication which could cause degradation or damage of the medication by the light waves. In the case of LED being in the cap this blocking member is positioned on the inside cover, but has the on-off switch, the manual slide switch for adjusting the predetermined times exposed for easy manual adjustment of the slide switch and for turning the manual switch on and off. In the case of the LED being in the lower part of the container the light blocking member is positioned between the bottom of the medicine containing chamber and the light emitting LED to block the medication from being damaged by the light waves.
In at least some embodiments, it is the object of the invention to have an inexpensive cap for the closure of the medication container and to have a manually operated switch which is a cap on the other end of the container which is brought into engagement by screwing the cap onto the container which forces all the electric circuits and battery components to be brought into connection with each other for activating the timer for a predetermined elapsed time. Once the predetermined elapsed time has run, the medication is taken by screwing off the cap which is used for closure of the medication container compartment and the medication container compartments is closed and then the cap on the other end of the container is unscrewed to break the circuits and re-screwed to engage the circuits again and initiate a predetermined time and a signal for lighting the LED for the predetermined time to elapse.
It is also an object of this invention to have a compartment in or proximate to the medicine container for the storage of medical data about the medications enclosed. This compartment in some applications of this invention are either enfolded into the medication compartment from the closed bottom of the medicine compartment and are configured for receiving a cap for providing closure of the container for storage of the medical information or are provided by having a compartment below the medicine containing chamber with a cap for securing the medical data.
It is also an object of this invention to have a rack or hub which can hold medicine containers in an arranged cluster of medicines for a patient and dispense the individual medicines and close the medicine container for setting the predetermined time by resetting the individual elapsed time for each bottle just by opening and closing the medicine bottles as the medication is being distributed. These racks or hubs may have clamp members which hold the medicine bottles and in some embodiments these clamp members have positioned between the clamp member and the hub, a fender pocket, which is provided with a cavity for storing medical information. The fender pocket is located proximate to and partially wraps around the medicine bottle it is associated with so that a patient can relate the medical data being held with the particular medication in the bottle.
Yet in further embodiments the clamp members are formed as C-clamps which extend out from the hub to releasable hold the medicine containers as an arranged cluster. In some of these embodiments there are provided grooves on the medicine bottles for receiving the arms of the C-clamps for holding the medicine containers. In some embodiments the bottles may have more than one set of grooves, such as two sets of grooves, which allows container hubs to be joined with each other by removably clamping different medicine bottles from different hubs with medicine bottles for clustering more medicine bottles and hubs together.
Further objects and advantages of the invention will be developed and expanded in the following portions of the specification wherein the detailed description is given for disclosed preferred embodiments of the invention without placing limitations on the scope of the invention.